Joel Gould
Journalist
Joel is a journalist with 20 years of experience and since February, 2011 he has been the late reporter at The Queensland Times. Joel specialises in longer features and as the late reporter he chases all the breaking stories that unfold in the evenings. A die hard rugby league fan, Joel has been pushing hard for the Western Corridor bid to be admitted into the NRL.

The revolutionary Ipswich Population Modeller (IPM), based on the uptake of wheelie bins, has been able to pinpoint South Ripley resident Megan Sabburg as Ipswich's 200,000th resident.

Deputy Mayor Paul Tully has long sung the praises of the modeller and said Ipswich was the only city in the world to use the award winning system of wheelie bin rollouts to measure population accurately. For that reason the IPM consistently scores top marks for accuracy against each census.

"A lot of councils use building approvals or electricity approvals," Cr Tully said.

"But the first thing people do when they move into their new home is order their wheelie bins.

"So we know that across Ipswich there are 2.7 people on average in each household."

That varies from suburb to suburb and the council factors that into its calculations. For instance, there are lower than average occupancy ratios in the older established suburbs and townships like Raceview (2.88 people per household) or Rosewood (2.62) compared to newer eststes like Springfield (3.25).

Cr Tully said that the wheelie bin technique of establishing population, introduced in 2005, had tracked the remarkable growth of Ipswich which saw 53,375 new residents welcomed to the city from 2006 until 2016.

Cr Tully said that represented an average annual growth rate of 3.5% over 10 years compared to the state average of 2%.